Plotting Course
March is for making plans. Let's talk about how I've made some of mine!
If you recall, from February, we’re crafting themes for a monthly zodiac in the Brimstone Clubhouse. These themes serve a multitude of purposes. They help produce more community involvement and offer more creativity in our interactions. When it comes to Fighting the Good Fight, having themes is helping create a rhythm in the content we provide. A good fight is a test in perseverance and momentum. It’s healthy if that momentum has direction which can keep us from being overly repetitive, all over the place, and builds an arc in the background of our content.
When trying to nail down a theme for March, it seems to me that March is the best time of year to plot our courses. I, and Brimstone Studios, are led by the winds that direct events like conventions, monster festivals, and artist residencies. While this planning takes place throughout the year, I often consider the beginning of my event year to start in mid-March with Planet Comicon. I spend a lot of early March planning prints, finalizing events, prepping my calendar (to the best of my ability), and making plans for the year. I think, after we’ve gotten our houses in order in January, and filled our energy in February, it makes sense that the next event would be plotting our courses.
We take for granted just how much changes in a year. This time last year, I was planning Planet Comicon, sure. But I had different goals. I had just started using a new banner. I’d committed to bringing bigger, more unique set ups to shows, and I was planning a month on the road in the summer. Over that time, I had dealt with the same reckoning we’d all been facing: Twitter’s decline into X was forcing us to all consider our relationship to social media. Some folks doubled down. Other folks created plans for leaving social media altogether. I had to work out a way to modify my involvement for it to better suit me.
Whether you agree with Elon Musk or not, X is not the Twitter we had. Users left in droves. Many were banned, some were reinstated. Advertisers lost trust in the site. Features suffered and staff was cut dramatically. Twitter was a business, it was for sale, and it sold.
The reason this came as such a reckoning to all of us — even folks like me with little involvement — is because online establishments are not a given. What feels like a town square, or a public forum, is really just a virtual nightclub charging advertisers for our admission they claim is free. Every single website is someone’s business. It has its own rules and internal regulations that impact how we interact with them, and others, on their platform. Nothing is built to last forever, nothing is guaranteed to serve us all forever, and we must always be prepared to change.
I didn’t know how to address these changes this time last year. I had a lot of learning to do. Facebook, Instagram, TikTik, Substack, BlueSky, they all have many of the same vulnerabilities and weaknesses Twitter did. All the platforms we generate content on are shells that rely on them to fill them up. However they decide we deserve to benefit from us giving them content is out of our hands. It’s brutal. Again, I wasn’t a huge Twitter user. But, I watched the decline and knew I needed to assess my relationship to social media, especially as it pertains to my health and business.
I’m not opposed to blowing up capitalism for something better. But, if we’re going to operate in the current economy, especially the online economy of users being products for advertisers, I feel we need to use the platforms that serve us and abandon the ones that don’t. We don’t have to do everything, and we most certainly do not owe any particular platform our content or our interest.
Meta has its fangs in me more than any other social media company. They kick me back a few bucks a month for being a small-tier public figure with over a thousand followers. I’ve been working on growing my presence on Facebook since 2011. It’s been my biggest investment with my biggest impact. But, Facebook is Meta’s game, and they can change the rules as they please. Art posts and genuine content posts don’t do as well as me complaining about a toilet. I’ve lost the thread on pushing good content there because Meta took the thread from me.
Twitter became an ultra-right wing hellscape. Instagram only wants to take down TikTok. Facebook desperately wants you to stay on Facebook and yell at one another. Cory Doctorow calls this Enshitification. Everything online sets out to please users until they have enough to please advertisers, then they end up pleasing no one. I think it’s a fair outlook for almost all products online.
After my long deliberation and ultimate conclusion that social media is not set up to please us, just itself, I decided that I don’t need to put energy toward anything that isn’t serving me best. I already know that I need to be ready to abandon any ship before it sinks its value to me in this environment, so I analyzed what’s working for me. This means that while I plot the course for what I am doing this year, event-wise, I know where I am putting my energy, and why. I know I want to invest more energy in original content. On top of putting as much of that on Patreon as possible, I want to get views on anything I share publicly. Because of that, I am reinvesting in Webtoon. Their content is all comics, so I know I’ll do better there with character vignettes and single panels than I will on a Meta product. Putting Violet 9 content on Webtoon gives me something new to push at shows, too.
Meanwhile, Fighting the Good Fight is doing great. Substack is user friendly, right now. We’re consistently growing subscribers, and readership is steady in the 900’s a month. That’s amazing! Clearly my energy is paying off on this venue. Yet another thing to work on bulking up, and promoting as I get around. It’s serving me well.
I’m preparing a calendar. I’m making art. I’m working to manage commissions. I’m writing. And, I’m trying to manage my health. If I can nail down a more structured path to success on these goals I can make them serve me even better. One thing I am doing this month is going back over my sales and attendance records for events to create expectations on what to expect and what to bring with me. This will also allow me to trim the fat on shows that aren’t serving me the best. Again, a lot of planning well is knowing what’s serving us best and what room we have for risks.
The enshittification of all things is awful. It brought me countless hours of stress in 2024. But knowing better where to put my effort lets me manage that stress better. Making a plan can be a lot of work, but anything that takes the stress off is worth it. So here’s to March, a month of plotting courses. Grab what’s serving you best, and embrace it. Prepare change. Plan your next move. We can make a good path forward while we work on changing the world.
Today’s Tune
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Keep up the good work!